Rent Your Witness (1950)

A Race to the Finish - Your Witness review by CH

"Women in Love! Sons and Lovers! The Rocking-Horse Winner!" In any pub quiz about films and D.H. Lawrence, these are some that might be called out but it would be a bold competitor who volunteered Your Witness (1950). Asked to explain and without giving much away, one could make an impressive case by saying that Lawrence plays a pivotal part in this film. Not he himself, of course, for he had been dead twenty years, but one of his poems is read aloud in court (premises, of course, with which he was familiar). The pub competitor could gain extra points by noting that the book entitled Collected Poems in the film is rather slimmer than the substantial one which gathered the work of that prolific author.

Things start at quite a pace - in New York, where Robert Montgomery is a sharp lawyer in the middle of a case which he succeeds in having declared a mistrial with the suggestion of political engineering by the opposing attorney. Meanwhile, his secretary has arrived with a cable, which is from the wife (Jenny Laird) of the Englishman (the unfortunately-named Michael Ripper), whose bravery saved them both at Anzio and is now living at a stables.

A taunt about the siring of a child upon Ripper's wife has led to a man being shot. He is in gaol, a trial is imminent and things do not look good.

Not only did Montgomery appear in almost every scene of this film but he directed it (dual rôles he had recently managed for Lady in the Lake and Ride the Pink Horse). If this one is not on their level, it is capably done. The fast-paced Manhattan opening serves to show that life moves more slowly in post-war England. He arrives in the village, finds lodgings in a pub, overcomes linguistic confusions, and gets a glimpse of the gradations of society.

By contrast with the darts players, there is a straight-backed, stiff-natured widowed Colonel (Leslie Banks), whose substantial house also contains his horse-loving teenage daughter (Ann Stephens) and his sister-in-law (Patricia Cutts) whose husband died in the war.

The formal English legal system means that Montgomery has to find oblique means to bear out his certainty that his wartime comrade is innocent. Even with the trial underway, this takes time. Nothing, and nobody, is quite as clear as all this might appear. Alliances are formed, inferences prove as misguided as they are understandable, and there is a curious, indeed sexual undertow - which is where D.H. Lawrence comes in as the expert witness. As St. Mawr shows, he understood more about horses than the rocking variety - and The Lost Girl shows that he was familiar with the movies. What would he have made of the advent of the talkies?